(Editor’s Note: I would like to extend a special thank you to Matt who e-mailed me a copy of Mark Berry’s original exercise description taken from the 1936 The Mark Berry Bar Bell Courses. If you are ever find yourself without your kettlebell, this is a great dumbbell exercise. Read carefully, Mr. Berry makes some very interesting points. For more information on The Mark Berry Bar Bell Courses, check out www.IronMind.com.)

“A very pretty, although somewhat outmoded and seldom practiced lift is The One Hand Swing. Properly executed, it makes a very neat feat to watch, and requires a certain amount of cleverness in respect to coordination and proper mastery of the necessary skill. English lifters formerly specialized on it to a great extent and probably became the outstanding exponents throughout the world. Very few Americans have paid attention to the lift.

Special paraphernalia is required for correct mastery – a short handle bar without inside collars (a sleeve fitted over a shout bar offering the best form of grip) so that the hand may rest against the front inside plate; a wide gauntlet should be warn for protection of the wrist; and, the bell should be loaded heavy on the rear end. Experiment and experience will prove the best means of determining the exact adjustments that will be required.

High inside plates should be used, and the front inside plate is to rest against the forearm as the swing is being performed. The bell is loaded heavy on the rear end so as to induce an inclination of the bell and consequent pressure against the gauntlet; the latter must be worn to protect the forearm and wrist from bruising.

Stand with the feet astride of the bell, the bar parallel with the feet, and the front plates about in line with the heels. The left hand should rest on the left thigh, or knee, as an aid in the effort of giving impetus to the bell. This starting position is not shown on the chart but it is very similar to the position of illustration Swing B.

Now, calling upon all the force at your command, straighten up and pull the bell to the position shown by illustration Swing A; the higher you pull the bell, the more impetus it should have, so straighten up to the limit.

Then, without pause, let the bell drop back to the position depicted by illustration Swing B; heave with everything you have and again straighten up.

This time, as the bell rises, you are to drop beneath it, as in illustration Swing C; and either through further lowering of the body, splitting of the feet, or both – maneuver into the position as shown in illustration Swing D.

Here is a pointer of importance; although the theory of the One Hand Swing is that the lifting arm should be kept straight throughout the movement, the English lifters popularized the practice of permitting a quick and snappy bend of the arm, much in the manner of a snatch; this overcomes much of the leverage and makes it possible to handle a greater poundage.

For efficiency sake, be certain to keep the arm straight until this final point is reached.”

I recently rediscovered Mark H. Berry’s Illustration Chart Third Course In Weight Lifting Technique while searching though some unpacked boxes. I noticed a sequence which is described as a swing. It’s actually an interesting variation of a one-handed dumbbell swing (see photo). Unfortunately, no exercise descriptions accompanied Mr. Berry’s wall chart. I searched for a written explanation of this drill, but came up empty.

Based on the picture sequences, I decided to give it a try. I experimented with a kettlebell, made a few minor tweaks in form, and discovered a fun and challenging drill. Please keep in mind that this was on Mark Berry’s 3rd Course In Weightlifting. In other words, this is an exercise for the experience KB lifter. This is not an exercise for beginners.

The Exercise:
This drill is a combination of the traditional KB swing followed by a snatch and front squat. In addition to the general conditioning benefits, the Strongman Swing develops great shoulder and hip flexibility and stability.

Perform a one-hand kettlebell Swing (photo A), be sure to drive hard with the hips to get full hip/knee extension.

Allow the kettlebell to swing back between the legs (photo B).

Drive hips for second swing, as soon as hips reach full extension (photo A) and KB is about chest height, pull it into a snatch. Simultaneously, dropping down into a one arm over-head squat (photos C, D).

Why Study War?

Victor Davis Hanson

reprinted with permission

Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

I came to the study of warfare in an odd way, at the age of 24. Without ever taking a class in military history, I naively began writing about war for a Stanford classics dissertation that explored the effects of agricultural devastation in ancient Greece, especially the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War. The topic fascinated me. Was the strategy effective? Why assume that ancient armies with primitive tools could easily burn or cut trees, vines, and grain on thousands of acres of enemy farms, when on my family farm in Selma, California, it took me almost an hour to fell a mature fruit tree with a sharp modern ax? Yet even if the invaders couldn’t starve civilian populations, was the destruction still harmful psychologically? Did it goad proud agrarians to come out and fight? And what did the practice tell us about the values of the Greeks—and of the generals who persisted in an operation that seemingly brought no tangible results?

I posed these questions to my prospective thesis advisor, adding all sorts of further justifications. The topic was central to understanding the Peloponnesian War, I noted. The research would be interdisciplinary—a big plus in the modern university—drawing not just on ancient military histories but also on archaeology, classical drama, epigraphy, and poetry. I could bring a personal dimension to the research, too, having grown up around veterans of both world wars who talked constantly about battle. And from my experience on the farm, I wanted to add practical details about growing trees and vines in a Mediterranean climate.

Yet my advisor was skeptical. Agrarian wars, indeed wars of any kind, weren’t popular in classics Ph.D. programs, even though farming and fighting were the ancient Greeks’ two most common pursuits, the sources of anecdote, allusion, and metaphor in almost every Greek philosophical, historical, and literary text. Few classicists seemed to care any more that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen—from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon—had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea. Dozens of nineteenth-century dissertations and monographs on ancient warfare—on the organization of the Spartan army, the birth of Greek tactics, the strategic thinking of Greek generals, and much more—went largely unread. Nor was the discipline of military history, once central to a liberal education, in vogue on campuses in the seventies. It was as if the university had forgotten that history itself had begun with Herodotus and Thucydides as the story of armed conflicts.

What lay behind this academic lack of interest? The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have fought—a catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat. The necessary corrective wasn’t to learn how such wars started, went forward, and were lost. Better to ignore anything that had to do with such odious business in the first place.

The nuclear pessimism of the cold war, which followed the horror of two world wars, also dampened academic interest. The postwar obscenity of Mutually Assured Destruction had lent an apocalyptic veneer to contemporary war: as President Kennedy warned, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Conflict had become something so destructive, in this view, that it no longer had any relation to the battles of the past. It seemed absurd to worry about a new tank or a novel doctrine of counterinsurgency when the press of a button, unleashing nuclear Armageddon, would render all military thinking superfluous.

Further, the sixties had ushered in a utopian view of society antithetical to serious thinking about war. Government, the military, business, religion, and the family had conspired, the new Rousseauians believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving individual. Conformity and coercion smothered our innately pacifist selves. To assert that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was now seen as antithetical to an enlightened understanding of human nature. “What difference does it make,” in the words of the much-quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

Those who want to study war in the traditional way face intense academic suspicion, as Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” suggests:

Confess: it’s my profession

that alarms you.

This is why few people ask me to dinner,

though Lord knows I don’t go out of my

way to be scary.

Historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence? Hence the recent surge of “peace studies” (see “The Peace Racket”).

The university’s aversion to the study of war certainly doesn’t reflect public lack of interest in the subject. Students love old-fashioned war classes on those rare occasions when they’re offered, usually as courses that professors sneak in when the choice of what to teach is left up to them. I taught a number of such classes at California State University, Stanford, and elsewhere. They’d invariably wind up overenrolled, with hordes of students lingering after office hours to offer opinions on the battles of Marathon and Lepanto.

Popular culture, too, displays extraordinary enthusiasm for all things military. There’s a new Military History Channel, and Hollywood churns out a steady supply of blockbuster war movies, from Saving Private Ryan to 300. The post–Ken Burns explosion of interest in the Civil War continues. Historical reenactment societies stage history’s great battles, from the Roman legions’ to the Wehrmacht’s. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores boast well-stocked military history sections, with scores of new titles every month. A plethora of websites obsess over strategy and tactics. Hit video games grow ever more realistic in their reconstructions of battles.

The public may feel drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and sacrifice, or because of interest in technology—the muzzle velocity of a Tiger Tank’s 88mm cannon, for instance—or because of a pathological need to experience violence, if only vicariously. The importance—and challenge—of the academic study of war is to elevate that popular enthusiasm into a more capacious and serious understanding, one that seeks answers to such questions as: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How best to avoid wars or contain their worst effects?

A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So it’s no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itself—despite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions.

It’s not that military history offers cookie-cutter comparisons with the past. Germany’s World War I victory over Russia in under three years and her failure to take France in four apparently misled Hitler into thinking that he could overrun the Soviets in three or four weeks—after all, he had brought down historically tougher France in just six. Similarly, the conquest of the Taliban in eight weeks in 2001, followed by the establishment of constitutional government within a year in Kabul, did not mean that the similarly easy removal of Saddam Hussein in three weeks in 2003 would ensure a working Iraqi democracy within six months. The differences between the countries—cultural, political, geographical, and economic—were too great.

Instead, knowledge of past wars establishes wide parameters of what to expect from new ones. Themes, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the centuries, and thus generally predictable. Athens’s disastrous expedition in 415 BC against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. But the story of the Sicilian calamity does instruct us on how consensual societies can clamor for war—yet soon become disheartened and predicate their support on the perceived pulse of the battlefield.

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars—or threats of wars—put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Miloševi?’s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces—but only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—or that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.

In the twenty-first century, it’s easier than ever to succumb to technological determinism, the idea that science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered the very rules of war. But military history teaches us that our ability to strike a single individual from 30,000 feet up with a GPS bomb or a jihadist’s efforts to have his propaganda beamed to millions in real time do not necessarily transform the conditions that determine who wins and who loses wars.

True, instant communications may compress decision making, and generals must be skilled at news conferences that can now influence the views of millions worldwide. Yet these are really just new wrinkles on the old face of war. The improvised explosive device versus the up-armored Humvee is simply an updated take on the catapult versus the stone wall or the harquebus versus the mailed knight. The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive, or of one sort of weapon over the other, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

So it’s highly doubtful, the study of war tells us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflict—unless some sort of genetic engineering so alters man’s brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that we need to fight wars with political objectives in mind and that, to conclude them decisively, we must defeat and even humiliate our enemies, so that they agree to abandon their prewar behavior. For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point 16 years ago, with the result that, on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Hussein’s supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the war’s proper aim—ensuring that Iraq would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of the region—we have had to fight a second war of no-fly zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.

Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didn’t—but a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did. Twenty-seven years later, a maritime Athens lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn’t evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy—to say the least.

The size of armies doesn’t guarantee battlefield success: the victors at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. War’s most savage moments—the Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima—often unfold right before hostilities cease. And democratic leaders during war—think of Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon—often leave office either disgraced or unpopular.

It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice ensures public support for war. But military history shows that far more often the perception of winning is what matters. Citizens turn abruptly on any leaders deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.” Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility. But a year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor battles—Cold Harbor claimed 7,000 Union lives in 20 minutes—the public reviled him. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had.

Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs—including the perception of the ups and downs—of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot. After the defeat of France, the losses to Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Dunkirk, Churchill took the blame for a war as seemingly lost as, a little later, it seemed won by the brilliant prime minister after victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, over 70 percent of the American people backed it, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. Four years of insurgency later, Americans oppose a now-orphaned war by the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore but because it felt that the battlefield news had turned uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform was too dear.

Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safety—or that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.

What, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge isn’t just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help. On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history—of war itself. We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them.

Studying War: Where to Start

While Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the three-decade war between Athens and Sparta, establishes the genre of military history, the best place to begin studying war is with the soldiers’ stories themselves. E. B. Sledge’s memoir of Okinawa, With the Old Breed, is nightmarish, but it reminds us that war, while it often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner’s tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.

From a different wartime perspective—that of the generals—U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton’s War As I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric general’s diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself.

Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides’ Trojan Women.

Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrück’s History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigley’s The Age of Battles center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo as tools to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman’s spellbinding short account The Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Donald Morris’s massive The Washing of the Spears, about the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history’s most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne’s superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Anything John Keegan writes is worth reading; The Face of Battle remains the most impressive general military history of the last 50 years.

Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch’s lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington is a classic study of England’s greatest soldier. Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, has been slighted recently but is spellbinding.

If, as Carl von Clausewitz believed, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary J’accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime is purportedly a favorite read of President Bush’s. It argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers’ esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.

In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle, I took that argument further and suggested that three of the most audacious generals—Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton—were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.

How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. Mark Moyar’s first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, is akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Horne has written a half-dozen classics, none more engrossing than his tragic To Lose a Battle: France 1940.

Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom does, and his volume began the recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August describes the first month of World War I in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941. Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric with no military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new but rather helps explain more than two centuries of both wise and ill-considered intervention abroad.

Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.

Anyone who has become a kettlebell devotee is aware of the testimonials purporting that training with the device “fixes bad backs”. Others have had direct experience with this claim. This article will explore specifically how the kettlebell accomplishes this from an evidence-based, scientific standpoint.

As an RKC, physical therapist and personal trainer I am specifically implementing variations of Jeff Martone’s H2H (hand-to-hand) drills for client low back rehabilitation. My discussion here focuses primarily on H2H drills with a nod to the kettlebell in general, later in the article. After some discussion of low back anatomy and associated muscle pathology, I will describe some of these exercises and their effects.

It is helpful for an RKC to have a rudimentary understanding of the concept of lumbar segmental stabilization. A segment is two vertebral bodies and all the structures in between including the discs and the facet joints. Segmental stability means that there is no abnormal displacement of one vertebrae on the other. An oft-used analogy is that of stacked children’s building blocks with perfect alignment. Proper segmental stability is the ability of each block to resist displacement during movement of the whole unit.

Punjabi’s model of stability is a three-tiered system (1). This includes the passive subsystem (osteoligamentous structures), the active subsystem (muscles) and the control subsystem (nervous system). This model allows that if there is a deficit in one system that the other two systems can compensate to maintain a degree of stability. If the capacities of theses systems are exceeded, then segmental “instability” is the result and this yields small micro movements of the vertebrae in relation to each other.

What does all this mean? Essentially, segmental instability leads to low back pain. It is these small, abnormal micro movements that lead to what Kirkaldy-Willis terms the “degenerative cascade”. This includes wear and tear on the discs, vertebral end plates and the facet joints.

A group of Australian physical therapists, the Queensland Group, has been able to identify specific patterns of muscle inhibition (weakness) associated with low back pain(2).

The Transverse Abdominis, Lumbar Multifidus and Consequences of Low Back Pain

The Transverse Abdominins (TrA), the deepest of the abdominals is considered a stabilizer of the spine by virtue of its attachment to the transverse processes of the lumbar vertebrae, along with the internal oblique and the latissimus dorsi via the lumbodorsal fascia. It provides stability through a mild compressive effect and by providing rigidity in the coronal plane. The TrA is also involved in end phase exhalation (an indication for Pavel’s power breathing in promoting lumbar stability).

The Queensland Group discovered that in normal spines the TrA actually contracted to stabilize the spine prior to an individual simply raising an arm(2). This is anticipatory control. In patients with low back dysfunction, anticipatory control is disrupted and the TrA exhibits delayed or altered firing. This suggests then that patients had a propensity toward lumbar segmental instability.

Further, they did real time ultrasound imaging of the Lumbar Multifidus (MF) muscle(3). The lumbar multifidus muscles are short, local muscles of the spine. They are located midline and deep in the lumbar region comprising the bulk of the “meat” in the lower lumbar region. This important muscle unit has multiple functions but its role in segmental stability can be thought of as a vertebrae pulling back onto itself.

The ultrasound imaging revealed that within one week of acute onset low back pain that the lumbar multifidus lost cross sectional area by 25% on the painful side(3). When asymptomatic subjects from the originally painful group were re-imaged at follow-up they did not necessarily recover the muscle fullness. Because of the function of the MF in segmental stability, this finding indicated that early insult to the low back can result in problems in resisting the abnormal micro movements discussed above.

Specific Training Reduces Low Back Dysfunction

The encouraging discovery of the Qeensland Group is that specifically training the TrA and MF results in decreased low back pain and much less likelihood of reinjury and patients seeking follow-up medical care(2).

Simply put… “muscle control = pain control”. This is where the kettlebell comes in powerfully.

Specifically training meant facilitating a co-contraction of the TrA and MF. Some of their work was misinterpreted to mean that performing abdominal hollowing ultimately increased low back stability. Stuart McGill, PhD, a Canadian biomechanist, has shown that this is not the case and that abdominal bracing is preferable to hollowing(4). However, the advice to pull your navel in toward your spine is common advice dispensed by personal trainers and physical therapists.

In Paradox Breathing, the abdominal muscles are tensed against the descending diaphragm during inhalation. As the diaphragm descends, it wants to displace the internal organs causing the typical bulging of the belly in breathing. Paradox Breathing develops instantaneous abdominal muscle tension with the inhale.

This abdominal muscle tension is maintained and then intensified during exhalation in Power Breathing. The abdominal muscle contraction, the “bracing” sort, is never lost during the breath cycle. Therefore, low back stability is facilitated. All beginning kettlebell trainees learn this important breathing techniqueduring the kettlebell swing.

Another physical therapist, Alec Kay in Alaska, did his dissertation on the MF (6,7). He intensely reviewed the literature regarding the anatomy and function of the MF. Mr. Kay concluded that the best exercise for the MF is rotation on an unstable surface (5). Here is the indication for kettlebell H2H drills in managing low back pain. Watch Jeff Martone demonstrate H2H exercises. Evaluate what is occurring in the trunk during around the body passing, upper cuts, tactical lunge etc. Rotation! Transverse plane movement! These movements powerfully yet safely recruit the MF.

I am particularly fond of “helicopters” as the movement is produced in a diagonal upper extremity and trunk pattern. The kettlebell moves horizontally on a vertical axis (transverse plane) during the pull-push-release. There is another rotation moment when you catch the kettlebell and I would bet that this is where there is intense activation of the MF. An EMG study could likely confirm this.

To further the effect of H2H drills attempt to perform the training on an unstable surface. I recommend Gray Cook’s Reebok Core Trainer. Dyna-discs, Bosu and other unstable surfaces can be too unstable rendering the drills impossible for most folks.

Obviously, H2H drills are for more advanced and coordinated clients but the exercises are a load of fun. The fun and the novelty of the kettlebell are similar to what Doug Kelsey, PhD; PT has called the 3rd Gravitating Body in rehabilitation. The 3rd Gravitating Body is anything introduced into a system to help overcome the predictable.

This article took a narrow look at a single application (H2H drills) of the kettlebell in low rehabilitation. There is further evidence of the efficacy of the kettlebell in treating low back pain. Specifically, this includes developing endurance of the lumbar extensors.

McGill cites research that suggests a correlation between diminished back extensor endurance and low back troubles (8). He concludes that the lesson for exercise prescription is that programs that emphasize extensor endurance are better than outright extensor strengthening exercises (8). Pavel Tsatsouline has advocated this as a specific benefit of kettlebell swings and snatches.

Vladimir Janda, a renowned Czech MD, for decades expounded on the concept of gluteal inhibition as a common muscle pattern exhibited in people with low back dysfunction. He found that this was associated with shortened and hypertonic hip flexors. This phenomenon is observable in the veteran population that I work with as a physical therapist. The gluteal contours of these individuals are flat; they have no butts! Again, the kettlebell comes to the rescue. Swings with emphasis on rooting the feet and a “static stomp” powerfully recruit the gluteals and improve hip extension.

So, there you have it. Scientific proof that kettlebells fix bad backs.

Now, you must be aware that this type of training is not appropriate for clients or patients with acute, severe and irritable symptoms. This type of training comes in at the chronic or stable stage in a client’s recovery. A typical client ill require some sessions of kettlebell basics prior to commencing H2H.

I do not mean to give short change to the basics. The wing and other basics are also tremendous training for the low back. There is nothing like high repetition swings for developing the back extensor muscles. I focus on H2H as a way of making low back rehabilitation super dynamic. Also, most clients performing H2H drills should start with the 18 lb. kettlebell and would rarely need to progress beyond the 26 pounder. You really have to be sensitive to load with the low back injured. However, eventually as the client gains function and has less pain, the other traditional KB exercises can be pursued with heavier loads to challenge the stabilizing mechanism.

It is valuable for RKCs to be armed with evidence-based information to provide to a skeptical fitness consumer or possible medical referral source. I would encourage RKCs to be able to articulate the science discussed in this article in language that is appropriate to their target audience. You may have to “gravitate down” in how you explain these concepts. You may contact me with any questions regarding this article at

Steve McNamara, PT, RKC, CPT is employed part-time as physical therapist by the Salt Lake City VA Healthcare System. His duties include acting as a Clinic Attending and Clinical Instructor in a nationally recognized physical therapy student intern program. He spends the rest of his time as a personal trainer and spreading the gospel of kettlebell training. Mr. McNamara was a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association in the early 1990s. He was a partner in a private physical therapy practice from 1991 to 1999.

This training program & progressions guide was designed specifically for the enhancement of Kettlebells: Cardio & Fat Loss for Women DVD. It enables you to best utilize the 20 pre-set programs, access your current fitness & skill level, plug into the most appropriate program (1-20) & level (1-52), and progress safely & systematically to higher levels. The idea is to make this a “One-Size-Fits-All” DVD. Indeed, it is!

Here’s how to use this Training Program & Progressions Guide…

1. Identify the appropriate weight KB for these categories:

Light

Medium

Heavy

2. Examine the “Progressions Guide” & the “20 pre-set programs” to determine what level you are currently working at.

3. Start at thatlevel & select thatprogram for your 1st workout.

Follow the recommended modifications

Analyze and move up or down to whichever level you think is best

4. Progress one level higher either:

Each workout

Each week

You’ve probably noticed a few things…

First, there are 52 progression levels. This would safely & systematically transform a novice into an elite athlete in just 52 weeks. Unfit and sedentary people need to allow their bodies to adapt gradually and everyone benefits from gradual increases.

The “TIME” includes the warm up & cool down, varying between 15 – 32 minutes. It is purposeful to reduce time when the intensity increases.

A specific goal – such as increased strength, intensity, or duration – is targeted at each level.

This Training Program & Progression Guide was carefully designed and meticulously organized to yield rapid results while adding variety. Stretch the workouts on the “Cardio” DVD to its limits!